Matt RaibleMatt Raible is a writer with a passion for software. Connect with him on LinkedIn.

The Angular Mini-Book The Angular Mini-Book is a guide to getting started with Angular. You'll learn how to develop a bare-bones application, test it, and deploy it. Then you'll move on to adding Bootstrap, Angular Material, continuous integration, and authentication.

Spring Boot is a popular framework for building REST APIs. You'll learn how to integrate Angular with Spring Boot and use security best practices like HTTPS and a content security policy.

For book updates, follow @angular_book on Twitter.

The JHipster Mini-Book The JHipster Mini-Book is a guide to getting started with hip technologies today: Angular, Bootstrap, and Spring Boot. All of these frameworks are wrapped up in an easy-to-use project called JHipster.

This book shows you how to build an app with JHipster, and guides you through the plethora of tools, techniques and options you can use. Furthermore, it explains the UI and API building blocks so you understand the underpinnings of your great application.

For book updates, follow @jhipster-book on Twitter.

10+ YEARS


Over 10 years ago, I wrote my first blog post. Since then, I've authored books, had kids, traveled the world, found Trish and blogged about it all.

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Friday June 20, 2003

Quit Reading Me!

Just kidding. It's just that the ol' bandwidth issue has reared its ugly head again. I sent the following message to Keith last night:

Am I reading this stats page correctly?

Am I already over my KB limit for the month?

His response:

Wow, you've almost 3/4 million hits already this month....

It looks like it averages about 7.7K per hit, so yep, you appear to be over 5 
GB already this month.

I only have a 5 GB plan, so I asked him how much it would be to move to a 10 GB plan (no response yet). Why don't I just move? Because I like Keith, and ever since I moved to the new server, stability has been awesome. I pay $30/month for the 5 giger, so hopefully I can get the 10 GB for an extra $10/month. Then again, according to this page, 8 GB is $80/month. Maybe I will be moving...

Posted in Java at Jun 20 2003, 06:23:31 AM MDT 11 Comments
Comments:

Did you look at the useragents? I don't even SEE ie in there. Wow! Wonder what it would be if all the different flavors of browsers were stuck together.

Posted by Angus on June 20, 2003 at 12:57 PM MDT #

I'm on a dedicated server at RackShack.net with 60GB of disk and 400GB a month (yes 4-0-0) for $99 -Russ

Posted by Russ on June 20, 2003 at 01:07 PM MDT #

Angus, what do you mean? #'s 1-4, 6, 7 are all IE. Matt, if you were more like me, and posted less interesting stuff (is that stuff that is less interesting or fewer interesting posts?) you're bandwidth would be much lower ;-)

Posted by Lance on June 20, 2003 at 01:19 PM MDT #

Darn it, I alwasy mess that up. I just saw all the mozilla's an thought "Mozilla/netscape!"

Posted by Angus on June 20, 2003 at 01:26 PM MDT #

Russ - sounds like a nice plan, but I don't think I'm willing to shell out $99/month just yet. Even with the extra bandwidth charges, I still only page $50-70/month. I'm sure I'll change my mind someday though...

Posted by Matt Raible on June 20, 2003 at 03:34 PM MDT #

Yeah - it's a bit expensive for "just a blog" but I switched TWICE in the last year because of bandwidth and diskspace problems and I finally just said "to hell with it". It's a luxury I can barely afford, but now I have an industrial strength web presence... and it's very freeing. My own box with my own space, tons of bandwidth (WTF would I need to serve up to use all that a month off a Celeron? Zipped Porno?) It's nice not having to share. By the way, my numbers are less than half of yours. I've really got to stop pissing off half my readers every few weeks... ;-) -Russ

Posted by Russ on June 20, 2003 at 05:34 PM MDT #

Matt, check out johncompanies.com's collocation Linux service. It's normally $75/month (40GB transfer), but since you're an OSS developer, you can get that for $45 (that's what I have). It's sweet - you have full root access, can install whatever you want, etc. It is not a true single machine you're on (it's a virtual server setup), but it's still pretty sweet. There may be some memory issues, as I had a client set up on here, and we couldn't reliably get over 256MB for the JVM, but that may or may not effect you. The guy there is super helpful and they are working on fixing the memory issue. The price is right, the abilities are great, etc. Note, you should also fix your RSS feed, er, well, some aggregators interpretation of it anyway. Every time you updated (starting about a week or two ago), I get a lot of posts that I've already seen. This means that for some reason my aggregator isn't properly grokking the dates or something, or that somehow the items in your feed are different (even though it's the same item, etc.) each time your feed updates .

Posted by Chris Bailey on June 20, 2003 at 06:54 PM MDT #

Matt, your background image is > 12k; surely it could be compressed better or replaced or whatever. It's a small tweak, but, if your bandwidth usage is really that high, balance a cool-looking graphic against money out of pocket every month.

Because you're well-linked you probably get a lot of casual visitors that don't return or not often (cache cleared) in addition to the frequent readers. I'm sure java.blogs has something to do with that. I've seen some other images (like ipods and ibooks) used on the blog as well, so those are targets for optimization (compress or get the image from a non-local source) or removal as well.

Another thing to look at is the RHS navigation being loaded all the time because it's not in a frame. There's a LOT there, which adds a lot of heft to each page.

I'm still waiting for the lightbulb to go off as to why it's so dang important for bloggers to have a calendar widget. Prev/Next and maybe a year and month dropdown would seem to make more sense for people to jump around when reading non-current stuff. You might want your own calendar widget for you only, so you can remember what you said on a particular day, but I don't think readers (for whom blogs are *really* for) really care or want to click on each and every day in order to navigate (click.. click.. click.. click.. click... ad nauseum). Just give me a week's worth of stuff (a managable "chunk"). Anyway, regardless of a calendar widget's usefulness it takes up bandwidth (your concern) and extra processing time (your pages seem kinda slow to load).

BTW, nice blog, regardless of my comments above. I visit now and then and usually learn something useful. Looking forward to the new book. - Gerry

Posted by Gerry on June 20, 2003 at 09:32 PM MDT #

BTW - saved your "java" category page and got a > 60k HTML file. Cut out everything above div id="menu" and the remainder was > 30k just for navigation and etc. Even if it came across compressed (gzip?) that's still big, especially if it happens on every page. -- G

Posted by Gerry on June 20, 2003 at 09:40 PM MDT #

I agree with Gerry - I don't think you have to move - just get smart about your file sizes and page content mate :) How to reduce your bandwidth by 66%:
  • Get rid of all the DHTML blog rolly stuff on the right which takes up lots of space and isn't read by most people most of the time.
  • Install GZip filter into Roller to zip outgoing pages - almost all browsers support this. Your HTML is > 60kb.
  • Split your permalinked posts into individual pages - that way people just view the single post they're interested in - not 6 posts on the one page.
  • Reduce / remove some of the images. In addition to the 64kb of HTML, you have over 180kb of images per page! I know some of this gets cached by the browser, but with a lot of visitors thats still a shitload of bandwidth wasted!
  • Fix your RSS feed. I think the last modified date doesn't seem to be set right, which causes NetNewsWire to download it all the time, rather than see it's not modified and ignore it. Assuming other people are using aggregators like me, that's a LOT of bandwidth right there.
For what it's worth, JavaBlogs is quite lean on the download times (total frontpage size is under 40kb, including images) and we still burn more than 1GB of bandwidth a day with it! (Hint: it doesn't make anywhere near that much money from all the banner and popup ads ;)) Hope this helps, Mike

Posted by Mike Cannon-Brookes on June 21, 2003 at 01:07 AM MDT #

I think I have to retract my johncompanies recommendation :( I've been having trouble with low memory (it's a virtual system setup), and with some odd stuff with not being able to write to stdout in regular ole bash scripts. I had a client I'd referred here, and they wound up having to bail too, due to the memory issues. Bummer, price was definitely right (for OSS developers). I'm now looking at Rackshack.net, serverbeach, and maybe others (anyone else have good ones to recommend? BTW, Matt, the new design looks great!

Posted by Chris Bailey on June 23, 2003 at 05:03 AM MDT #

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